Abstract

Like most other websites, the site of the University of Groningen has an embedded search function. The perceived quality of this search function is not great, but users do not have a clear idea why. Analysis of the search logs reveals that almost half the search actions does not directly lead to satisfying results. In this thesis, we will try to pinpoint the specific weak points in the current search engine. Also, we will explore different ways to improve search engines, and try to determine the most efficient ones. One of the more interesting possibilities seems to be the use of clustering algorithms to group the results. To explore the feasibility of clustering, some experiments have been done, which lead to not wholly satisfactory results.